


Healing

by Frangipanidownunder



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-07
Updated: 2018-10-07
Packaged: 2019-07-27 19:34:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16225868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Frangipanidownunder/pseuds/Frangipanidownunder
Summary: Sequel to Superficial Burns, from the prompt Would you write a sequel to your last One Son fic, maybe before The Unnatural where Mulder tries to apologize?





	Healing

They play house too soon. He presses to share the master bedroom, “to add authenticity”, but she pushes him out. She’s being petty, she knows, pointing out toothpaste tube and toilet seat misdemeanours. Still, he’s genuinely playful, attentive for a while, but she flips her gloves at him, bats away the camcorder, turns her cheek as he goes to kiss her. Ironically, their discord only gives them more authenticity as a couple.

She shut him out and she shouldn’t have been surprised when he drops her home and doesn’t ask to carry her bag up. Her apartment is as empty as she feels. She goes to bed and punishes herself with the desperate noise he made when he came inside her, the way his lips pressed against the juncture of her jaw and ear lobe, the slow opening of his eyes, pupils dilated, surprise followed by awe followed by guilt.

She should have quit. She should have walked away. He did.

Arthur Dales tells Mulder she saved his life, that she is savvy and Mulder has the good grace to look contrite. He’s mysterious about the robbery in the bank, about how he knew the female accomplice. He rambles on about déjà vu and Scully can’t help but review the past through the lens of the present. Like the memory of their frantic coupling in her kitchen is trapped in the wrong spot in her brain. Like if it only happened yesterday, she would say something to him, he would say something to her.

And then he admits to an online friendship with Karin Berquist, a woman enamoured of him yet he acts like he can’t see it. She wonders just how ignorant he can really be.

He fucked her in her apartment and hasn’t talked about it since.

She saves a boy in a phonebooth. Saves a child. What she can’t do is save herself. Padgett’s words burn through her. Agent Scully is already in love. She hates it. She fucking hates that it’s someone else telling her the secrets of her own heart. And that it is so fucking obvious.

She should have quit.

After, Mulder books a motel room. He won’t leave her alone. Part of her wants to yell at him that he’s as bad as Padgett, always there, hovering. He keeps looking at her chest like there’s a gaping hole there. It’s not that her heart is missing, that’s the thing. It’s that it’s still there. Beating. Full of a secret, her secret. And she’s sure he can see it.

“Scully, there’s something I’ve been meaning to say to you for a while,” he says but he’s lying across the bed with his long legs stretched out and his tee clinging to his frame and that soft expression he wears when he’s off the clock.

“I’m tired.” She sounds like Laura Petrie.

His lips push out and his eyes flick to the television screen briefly. When he turns back to look at her he sits up and rests his elbows on his knees, rubbing at the back of his hair. He’s tired too. “I thought I’d lost you,” he says and he’s already taking a huge gulp of air in. He slaps the bed linen and she sees that he is trembling. “I thought you were dead. In my apartment. On my floor. Your heart gone.”

“I’m fine, Mulder.” She’ll always be fine. Heart or not.

He covers his face with his hands. Beautiful long fingers. His strangled moan is a shock. For a split second she thinks he’s weeping, but when his hands fall away, his eyes are dry and angry. “You’re fine,” he says. “Well, that makes it all right.” The low rumbling is not, she finds out, on the television. It is coming from him.

She slips under the covers of her bed and turns out the lamp. He doesn’t move. Just growls like a wounded, angry Alpha.

The case in Las Vegas is nothing but a fever dream. Mulder pries her for more information but she can’t tell him anything. He accepts it, offers to buy her a bagel.

“Real cream cheese,” he says and she laughs. It feels like her heart is beating to a different rhythm. A lighter one.

The diner is too shiny but she lets him yammer on as she tries to hide her eyes from the brightness. The bagel is good. Mulder is relaxed, smiling. These are the times she knows she’ll never quit. He sips his second coffee so slowly she begins to wonder if he’s building up to something.

“You okay, Mulder?”

He looks out to the street where an old couple wander past, arm in arm. “They seem happy together,” he says. “How do you suppose that feels?”

“Are you really asking my expert opinion on the longevity of relationships, Mulder?”

His fingers thrum on the table top, scattering grains of sugar. He chuckles. “We’re shit at this, aren’t we Scully?”

“This?”

“Talking.”

“Ah, yes. That.”

He does that slow blink again and she sees them in her apartment, rutting. Base emotion. Need. The burn on her fingers.

“I should have told you earlier, after…you know…that night. I was out of line. What I said to you about making it personal. Diana…she believes in me and I…”

“I believe in you, Mulder.” She stands up. He says nothing more. No scrambling backwards, no apology, nothing. He fucked her in her apartment and then walked away. She holds his gaze just enough to make his lips press together. “I always have.”

He lets her leave. She should have quit.

He calls her later. Wants to come round. She tells him she’s busy. He whispers a sorry as she cuts him off. He arrives 30 minutes later. He walks past her, goes to the kitchen. To the same spot.

“Why are you here, Mulder?”

He stands where he stood, where he put his hands on her. Where she unzipped his pants and he bunched up her skirt. “You said that before,” he says, “And then we…”

She folds her arms around her ribs. Covers her heart. “Fucked.”

He flinches.

“It’s what we did, Mulder. You could hardly ascribe a more romantic name to it. Did you tell Diana?”

“What? No!”

His too-quick outburst makes her feel unexpectedly superior. He fucked her and walked away. And maybe he has pushed it deep inside ever since, too.

He scratches his chin. “I stood outside your building for ten minutes that night, arguing with myself about whether to turn round and go back to you.”

“You’re pretty hard to argue against,” she says. “You have this way of twisting everything into the neat theory you’ve already designed.”

“Scully.” It’s more resignation than warning. He leans back against the counter, one knee bent towards her. “I came here to say what I should have said then. That I’m sorry I said that to you, about Diana. That I should never have reduced your input into our partnership to something purely emotional. I…” His hand slams his bent thigh. “I am sorry, Scully. Truly. I never meant it to happen…”

“You need to leave.”

“That way,” he adds but he’s already nearly at the door. He looks back, framed in the doorway. “I never meant it to happen that way, Scully. You mean more to me than that, much more.”

He shuts the door and she leans against it listening to him leave again. Footsteps fading. He won’t wait outside tonight.

She tries to sleep but her skin is crawling, burning. Her heart is red hot and heavy in her chest. She imagines strips of it peeling away, shavings of her love falling deep into an empty cavity. But this time, she doesn’t think she should have quit. She knows she can never.

At 2am she drives across town. She knocks quietly. On his couch, he is backlit by the soft ocean colours of his fish tank. His stubble cuts a line across his jaw that is as sharp as the stabbing in her chest. Her fingers slide in and out of each other, knuckles rubbing together.

“You mean more to me too, Mulder,” she says. “And I’m sorry for asking you to leave. I…” she licks the dry patch on her lip and the couch creaks as he stands up. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry too. I am not good at this.” There is a tear building at the corner of one eye. It’s a weakness she dislikes. A demonstration of her vulnerability that she’s spent years trying to overcome. But he presses his thumb to it, collects her softness and lets it run down his wrist.

“Can we start again?”

“Ignore six years of partnership?”

His hand is a familiar comfort on her lower back as he urges her to sit. “No, use six years of partnership to our advantage instead of using it as wedge between us.”

One of his mollies floats to the side of the tank and she watches its graceful fins and tail fluttering in the water. “How do we do that?”

“Doing more of that thing we’re shit at?” He laughs and she cuffs away the tears streaking her cheeks.

“And Diana? Where does she fit in all this?”

He looks ahead, at the posters on his wall that catch the passing headlights from the street below. “Where she always did, Scully. In the past.”

They flirt over clichés in the basement office. When he grapples her tofutti rice dreamsicle from her hands, their skin sparks together in way that tingles but doesn’t burn. He kisses her lips and tells her he’s going to see Arthur Dales.

“In Florida?”

“No, he’s here in Washington.”

She watches him for a while. The ease with which he swings the bat. The movement of his shoulders. He’s in his element.

“So, uh… I get this message marked urgent on my answering service from one Fox Mantle telling me to come down to the park for a very special very early or very late birthday present. And, Mulder… I don’t see any nicely wrapped presents lying around so, what gives?”

It’s not until he tells her to “get over here, Scully,” she fully understands what this is. Sure, it’s baseball. Sure, they flirt. Sure, it’s a date, Mulder-style. But it’s more than the sum of its parts.

It’s healing.


End file.
